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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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Born in Pampa, Texas, Mary Rose O’Reilley was educated in the parochial school system of Roseville and St. Paul, Minnesota. She graduated from the College of St. Catherine and completed graduate work at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.

She was awarded the 2005 Walt Whitman Award for her first book-length collection of poems, Half Wild, which will be published in the spring of 2006 by Louisiana State University Press. The winning manuscript was chosen by Mary Oliver.

O'Reilley's awards include a Contemplative Studies Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, a Bush Artist Grant, and the McKnight Award of Distinction. She is the author of the non-fiction books The love of impermanent things: a threshold ecology (Milkweed Editions, 2006); and The Barn at the End of the World (2000).

Since 1978 she has taught English and environmental studies at St. Thomas College. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Speaking In Tongues

I go to church every Sunday
though I don’t believe a word of it,
because the longing for God
is a prayer said in the bones.
When people call on Jesus
I move to a place in the body
where such words rise,
one of the valleys
where hope pins itself to desire;
we have so much landscape like that
you’d think we were made
to sustain a cry.
When the old men around me
lift their hands
as though someone has cornered them,
giving it all away,
I remember a dock on the estuary,
watching a heron get airborne against the odds.
It’s the transitional moment that baffles me—
how she composes her rickety
grocery cart of a body
to make that flight.
The pine siskin, stalled on a windy coast,
remembers the woods
she will long for when needs arise; so
the boreal forest composes itself in my mind:
first as a rift, absence,
then in a tumble of words
undone from sense, like the stutter
you hear when somebody falls
over the cliff of language. Call it a gift.

Mary Rose O'Reilley

The author of a collection of poetry and several works of non-fiction, Mary Rose O'Reilley was the recipient of the 2005 Walt Whitman Award

"Art is what remains when the pot is broken."
—Chinese proverb
I know we are bound to the earth,
and the cracked heart, old terra cotta,
surrenders to vine.
Listen—I've seen
wind stir the hair of the dead at Belsen,
growing like art from the lacing grass